"Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts to breaking it. The most famous example of the illicit slave trade in the 1850's was the schooner Wanderer, owned by Charles A. L. Lamar, member of a famous and powerful southern family. Lamar orgnized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these pas the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo of five hundred africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors
of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee imitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action and advocated repeal of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade. "Longer to yield to a sickly sentiment of pretended philanthropy and diseased mental aberration of 'higher law' fanatics," said the jurors in reference to opponents of the trade, "is weak and unwise." When northerners criticized the acquittal of Lamar, a southern newspaper denounced Yankee Hypocrisy: "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law 'against the African slave trade in the South?" Lamar repurchased the Wanderer at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment."
Battle Cry of Freedom, p 103, by James McPherson
Twenty percent of the Wanderer's cargo died on the way here.
Walt